In the recent days – when Ethereum’s Ether-blockchain forked into ETH and ETC – we could not do else but read the term “Replay Attack”. If you wondered what exactly a replay attack is, continue to read. I will explain.

The basis of the Replay Attack is the fact that all wallets which contained Ether at the time of the fork will credit their corresponsing Ethereum Classic wallets with ETC. So, if you had, say, 100 ETH in your wallet, then you’ll be credited with 100 ETC.
But that’s not an automatic process (well, it is, but only under certain circumstances): it only works on exchanges which support the quasi-new Ethereum Classic chain.

Tonight, ETC (Ethereum Classic) trading has launched on Poloniex. Some folks have decided to stick to the principles of blockchain and not support the idea of just rolling things back for minor purposes. That’s when Ethereum Classic was born.
Reasoning behind the creation of ETC was the strong belief that the resolution of the DAO debacle was handled “in the worst way possible”, and that there’s still a significant minority opposition which was against the DAO bailout hard fork:

“The main goal of the project is to ensure survival of the original Ethereum blockchain. We will strive to provide alternative for people who strongly disagree with DAO bailout and the direction Ethereum Foundation is taking their project. Anyone opting to remain on the original chain should have such opportunity.” – ethereumclassic.github.io

Plans are to continuously develop the Classic fork and “maintain upstream patches similar to the relation between Redhat and CentOS, until a community can form around the project and create a road map”.

First off: Ethereum is – compared to many, many other cryptocurrency projects – a great project, and its tokens, Ether, are being traded on the exchanges for quite some time, now. With price moving up and price moving down. But as Ethereum gained more popularity, the down phases suddenly became rare. Volumes of 1.000 BTC only on Poloniex became common, and soon, the daily amount being traded increased well into the five figures – sometimes even close to 100.000 BTC on a single day.
Yes. That’s right. 10.000.000 USD worth of traded Ether and more, and an increase in value of 60x the IPO price. People (that being traders, “investors”, regular shitcoiners and what not) were in a great mood and shorting Ether became the new synonym for financial suicide. Things were great and lots of profits were made (as long as you didn’t have that stupid idea of shorting Ether).

Bad news, security incidents or anything that would earn any other cryptocurrency you can think of a horrible death didn’t seem to affect Ether. Users in crypto related chatrooms were preparing their shorts (“It just has to dump on this!”), just to find themselves being margin called later on. I have refrained from shorting ETH after two small failed attempts, but what happened there just didn’t feel right.